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About Elise Strobach

Elise founded AeroShield to pursue the vision of sustainable materials that improve lives and reduce environmental impact. She studied Mechanical Engineering during her PhD at MIT and has been working with aerogels and the built environment for 10+ years. AeroShield was founded in 2019 to manufacture aerogel insulated windows that can cute energy losses through windows in half. Together with her co-founders, Elise has raised $10M, been awarded more than $20M in non-dilutive funding, and been featured in Forbes 30 Under 30: Energy.

Episode Highlights

Links and resources

• AeroShield – the company that Elise founded
• NSF (National Science Foundation) – A U.S. government agency that funds research and innovation in science and engineering.
• NSF SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) – A funding program that supports early-stage R&D at small businesses with strong commercial potential
• NSF I-Corps – A program that provides funding and training for researchers to explore the commercial potential of their innovations.
• Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) – A state agency that funds and supports clean energy innovation and startups in Massachusetts.
• CleanTech Open– A startup accelerator that provides mentorship, training, and exposure to help cleantech entrepreneurs scale their innovations.
• American Made Solar Prize: A U.S. Department of Energy competition offering funding and resources to accelerate the commercialization of innovative solar technologies.

Interview Transcript

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Hello Elise, welcome to Invisible Ink. We’re so excited to have you here today.

Elise Strobach: Thank you. Very excited to join and share some of my experience at AeroShield.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So yeah, which brings us to the question of AeroShield. For those of us who are not familiar, can you just tell us a little bit of what the company does?

Elise Strobach: Absolutely, $200 billion in energy is lost through our windows each year around the globe. And AeroShield thinks that it’s really time that we end that kind of energy loss. So we’re looking to bring this amazing material called a silica aerogel which is one of the most insulating materials in the world.

But we found a way to make it also clear. So now you have something that’s more insulating than even the air in the room that you’re sitting in. It can be clear light glass. So when we put that inside of an existing window using the same manufacturing process that we use to make windows today, we can actually make a window product that’s 65% more insulating while being 40% thinner and lighter than other products that would get you that same thermal performance.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Awesome. I know we can use it in Chicago right outside my window in the winter. So it sounds like the insulating properties of this material were known but the innovation that you brought to the picture was really around making it transparent and light conducting is my understanding. Correct?

Elise Strobach: That’s definitely the fundamental breakthrough that we had at the lab where I was working on my PhD in mechanical engineering at MIT. I would say that what came out was this breakthrough that led to me focusing my PhD on how we actually optimize this material into a version that could be deployed into real products like solar thermal energy harvesting and grocery store freezer doors and of course windows and doors for your home.

From Lab Breakthrough to Commercial Application

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So now you’ve got this idea of taking it to a commercializable application. Then just walk me through what happens from there till the point that you decide to create a startup around it.

Elise Strobach: Yeah so looking back on it now, it looks like a very short jump from, oh, you know, this great breakthrough in the lab, let’s spin out a company. But that was actually several years. So I was probably in the lab working for about a year and a half, two years on a project that was using this aerogel material but it didn’t have this clarity. So it was just really super insulating.

And we actually had a little bit of sort of an accident in the lab and we started to make samples for this solar thermal high temperature application that looked really clear. And you know, as we talked with other experts in the area, they sort of said, you have something really interesting and we think you should go talk to the industry and see if beyond this solar thermal energy harvesting application that you started looking at this material for –  was there an even bigger place that you could solve a problem? How did this material have a fundamental new property with it?

And so that sort of transition kicked off in 2017 and it was the next two to three years of me getting training as a scientist into understanding, how can this solve a problem? What is entrepreneurship at its core which is a problem and a solution and trying to deliver that solution.

And so there were many years of exploring different kinds of markets, different applications, understanding the history of not only the material but the different applications that it had been applied for in the past, including windows, understanding why that had failed, why what we were doing was different and why it could succeed. And what still work was remaining to go before it could be a product that was out in the market having impact. So it was a really long time of incubating on different applications, different ways to potentially deliver this product to market.

And for the majority of those early days, I really wasn’t thinking about starting a company. I was thinking about, me and my colleagues have found this really amazing property. How do we deliver that solution into the market where it can actually solve that problem?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: And you’re still doing your PhD at this time, correct?

Elise Strobach: Correct.

Navigating the Commercialization Process

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Okay, so there are two different tracks that I’m kind of hearing here. One is around just adapting this technology to a real world application which is making sure that it does its thing and the dog eats the dog food, so to speak, right?

And the other piece is around this other leg where we have to kind of keep an eye out on commercialization. So what were you focused on in terms of that commercialization aspect? Was it just talking to industry? Like, what was in your mind in terms of that end goal from a market perspective or a commercialization perspective while you were doing this?

Elise Strobach: Yeah. So I would say it was almost lots of opportunities to explore and I think lots of different pathways that we could have gone in those early days of saying. For example, I remember having a discussion with my research advisor around, Hey, what we’ve uncovered right now with this material, we could either continue to advance these properties at a research level or we could take what we’ve got and try and scale it up, try and make it cost effective at scale as a manufactured material.

And the kinds of work that would go on with those two different pathways was very different. I think that there was a lot of collecting different ways to get this material out into the market and looking at with the resources that we had. So not only the intellectual property from MIT.

The momentum that we had from the research and the demonstrations that were going on in the solar thermal application but even if we wanted to pivot to a different application, there was a lot of getting this material out into a device that was operating under real world conditions. We had a lot of momentum on this manufacturing path. So  I do think it was a little bit of this iteration of taking a look at the different scenarios, kind of narrowing it down to the ones that felt like they were most achievable with the momentum or the resources we had in hand. Then bringing that new solution out into the world and kind of testing if that would work.

We tested that with customers, not only the direct customers that would be physically purchasing our solution but our customers and our customer’s, customers, all the way down to the end user and really mapping out before we ever got serious about spinning out of the lab, hypothetically just saying, what would this take, let’s put this cohesive plan all on paper.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So walk me through an example. What does that mean in real life? Who’s your customer? Who’s your customer’s customer, and who’s your customer’s customer’s customer and give me like a little vignette of what that test might look like.

Elise Strobach: Yeah. So if you’ve ever had to purchase windows for your home, you as the homeowner are going to be the one that’s going to write the check for those windows and you’re going to be the one that pays the energy bill. But oftentimes, we find that more than 90% of people who are purchasing a window for their home don’t know what the performance properties are of windows and what window is going to make their home the most comfortable and the most energy efficient.

So that’s usually where you have a distributor or an installer. They can come in different combinations. But generally, you have somebody that’s going to make sure that you’re picking out the right window and that it’s going to get into your home with the right match for performance. In order for that person to be able to help you pick out your window and deliver it to you, you’re going to need somebody who is actually making and storing this full product.

So we think about that as window manufacturers for residential. Some of the big players are going to be Anderson, Pella, Marvin, and Jeld-Wen. So very familiar names. But actually, one step above them, there’s a couple of entities in the U.S. that make what’s called an insulated glass unit or basically like a glass sandwich with air or dry argon inside that allows them to be insulating. And that’s who AeroShield really sees as its customer. We want to be able to actually take that glass that they’re using today, the equipment that they’re using today and upgrade it. Just deliver it so that our material can just be inside that sandwich. Deliver all that thermal performance, and require almost no changes from the window industry. And so that’s the pathway that we see.

But just also want to call out that the above kind of these customers who are making these insulated glass units, there’s actually glass makers as well, right? So people who are making different kinds of coated glass or you might think about tempered glass for your door—those are all different varieties of glass. So we also see those entities as potential long-term customers as well. Because fundamentally, what we make is a material. And so, a glass material maker, somebody who buys glass materials or anybody downstream of that to make that product get into your home—those are all people that we think about.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So just to kind of synthesize what I heard. Before worrying about is this a startup or is this something that I could license to another large manufacturer. It sounds to me like you were connecting the dots from where you were in the lab down to where there’s a window outside here and where it would be sitting so that you kind of understood what every step needed to look like and that connectivity was there from start to finish. Is that right in terms of that part of the process?

Elise Strobach: Absolutely. And some of the training that I had through these grants but also some of the courses that I took at MIT, actually trained me on how to do stakeholder mapping—to actually say, okay, you are definitely going to need to care about your customer. That’s obvious.

You’re definitely going to need to care about this end user, this homeowner who’s going to be experiencing your window. But it turns out that there’s all these other entities, and not just what I described in the physical manufacturing chain. There’s also regulatory bodies, right? There are housing codes, local and state mandates that change.

And what we did in the early days before we ever had any thought about doing a startup was just to say, this fundamental material we have that’s now super insulating and clear—for all these different stakeholders that it could impact in this market—what is the potential value that they would be getting from our product?

So it’s value proposition mapping. Trying to understand, make guesses about, oh, well, if that distributor’s a couple iterations down from me, how do I understand what value I could create for them or what problem I’m solving for them?

And so then we actually just went out and physically talked to those people and did hundreds and hundreds of direct kind of customer interviews to say, this was our hypothesis about the value that they’d be getting or how a typical window would be delivered to a home. Let’s go out and run an experiment by going out and asking those individuals if that’s how it really goes.

Building the Startup: Challenges and Strategies

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Love it. So at this point you’re still doing a PhD. I just want to clarify. You’re still doing a PhD but then you kind of got this one leg in the other space kind of marketing it and commercializing it. At this point, have you decided that you’re going to do it as a startup or are you not sure yet which way it’s going to go?

Elise Strobach: Yeah, I would say that because the PhD thesis is sort of this long kind of endeavor from the start. At least my mentality in it was: I’ve got this period of time that I’m here, I’m focused on this. I’m dedicated. Let’s just get this solution, regardless of how it is best delivered into the world.

Let’s just develop that as far as we can, and I’ll actually make that a bit of my thesis. So actually, in my thesis, I was able to do some actual study of the market and say, “Oh, like historically, this is what had happened, and these were the triggers that we saw when a technology like AeroShield in the past has been able to come in and disrupt the market.”

So it ended up kind of blending from this definitely just brought a lot of that work into my thesis. And to be honest with you, I did my best in—even research papers to try and pull that industry motivation and really connect that. So I think of it much more fundamentally as: at that time, I was learning a lot about startups as a mechanism to deliver the solution but I was really studying tech-to-market transfer.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: I love it. Is there a single biggest aha that came up through that? How to successfully commercialize innovation, tech innovation?

Elise Strobach: I think really fundamentally, this kind of concept of connecting the problem to the solution, it feels really fundamental. But with a PhD, I experienced a lot of this very particular language to be able to publish in certain journal articles, right?

You are motivated to make a very impactful-sounding article, right? Not necessarily make it really simple and really understandable. And so I feel like that was potentially one of the big aha moments that I had was the more simple I can make this, the more that I can take the innovation from the lab and say, does it really matter how we came up with this material that can solve a problem? Not really, unless that’s important to how we deliver the solution.

But if it’s not, it’s almost like setting the research mode and these parts about the fundamental material itself that I was passionate about, almost understanding that the more I focused on solving the problem for the industry.

I realized that some of the problem the industry had was they weren’t aware of these different alternative technologies. So it maybe wasn’t my job just to deliver this single solution but to understand fundamentally and continue to question how I can be sure that my understanding is correct of the experience of the problem that the industry is experiencing.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So if I would like to state it back in what I understood. It sounds to me like the secret to successfully commercializing technical innovations like yours is to bring application and industry factors much earlier into the process and almost do like a parallel processing of both the technical innovation side as well as what I’ll call like design for application almost in terms of understanding that as you’re building it. It has to also be applicable in a real world and be able to be integrated into some kind of commercial context or application. Is that a fair characterization?

Elise Strobach: Yeah. I think the only thing that I would add is the more that I communicated in a very generalist language, the less that I tried to elevate this as a fundamental nano structure breakthrough. The more that I started to say, we have this material that’s just 65% more insulating and we can deliver in the same form factor. The more simple that it became, the better the feedback that I got on how this material could solve the problem.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Love it. Okay, so focus on the application. Focus on simplification and focus on the so what of the innovation rather than what’s so amazingly technical about it is what I’m hearing.

Elise Strobach: Absolutely. And I think what comes with that is being your own biggest skeptic on how well you understand the problem. And one of those tests is how well you can describe it to somebody who’s experiencing it.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: I love it. So then at some point you decided to spin out as a startup. When did that happen and what was the trigger for that?

Elise Strobach: Yeah. So AeroShield, you know, I’ve been taking a couple of different courses in entrepreneurship at MIT in particular to support, to make the research better, to make the execution on the grants better. I started to realize that as a one-woman show, it wasn’t iterating as quickly as I felt the technology could enable. That the technology was starting to get pretty ready.

And this was maybe within a year of the end of my PhD. So I started in 2014. Mentioned had this kind of breakthrough, this pivot, towards looking at a tech-to-market kind of focus in 2017. Not about two and a half, three years later was when I was really starting to feel that I had something exciting here but definitely needed more to get it out of the university and to feel that we were really doing it justice —doing the technology justice in the way that we were spinning it out.

And so I took a project-based course at MIT that actually had you sort of almost apply, almost interview for a spot in the course. And they actually divided up the students and assigned them to projects that they would work on, like real-world projects from PhDs like Elise working on AeroShield  and then assigning a group of three to four other students who were interested in exploring entrepreneurship. They sort of cultivated those teams to be across business backgrounds, engineering backgrounds and a variety of different experiences and technical expertise. And that was really the testing ground for AeroShield.

Through the course, we sort of went through like a mini version of stress testing the business plan. So all aspects, everything from who’s your founding team, what’s your mission going to be, really specifically who’s your customer and where are you going to start and then grow to. And through that process, I had the opportunity to work with four other people who hadn’t done any research in aerogel, had no reason to join in this and the momentum that we made during that course was just phenomenal.

So one, I think it helped me feel really confident that all of these questions that could pop up, do we really have all the fundamental bones for a startup? The course kind of took us through and said yes.

I think even more importantly for me is of the four people that I went through the course with, three of them at the end of the course said, we want to keep working on this — let’s go apply for pitch competitions. And so that for me was, oh, it’s not just me seeing this. And it’s not just me that’s motivated to work on all the factual things, all the recipe for changing the market is here. And I’m gaining momentum with people when I share this story who want to help me solve it.

And so it was that, combined with actually winning a prize competition — the Clean Energy Prize. And we had to make a decision to incorporate and accept the funds. And so it was like, we had stress-tested the business, we had confidence, had a team around me, and had momentum. And now we had this validation with a check. And that was I think, really the thing that pushed us over the edge and said, okay, now it’s time to spin out. We’ve got everything we need.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Congratulations. So you’ve got the prize you’ve incorporated and now you’re on the path. What’s the next big challenge you had to face? And just walk me through the high level. What are like the two or three big hurdles you have to jump through once you’ve now committed yourself to the startup path?

Overcoming COVID-19 and Scaling Up

Elise Strobach: So, number one was that we chose to spin out of a university right when Covid hit. So it was definitely the number one lesson. And had all of this momentum, had really been doing a lot of networking, which I’ll just share—for me, I’m a researcher but also a huge introvert.

So I found a lot that I really had to work up into it. And then it just sort of froze everything and we didn’t know what the future would hold. And in a lot of ways, that ended up being a really great lesson and kind of taking a breath before we jumped right into the pool from the standpoint that it gave us a moment.

I remember about a month sitting in lockdown, going, What do we do? But so was the rest of the world. So we took that time to take a look at our plan. I think that was the number one lesson that we learned early on that really helped us was, it’s almost always a good investment to test the assumptions in your plan before jumping into it.

The time it takes. Sometimes the discipline of taking a look at what you know you put together, and taking a look at it again with really critical eyes and saying, If I look at this right now with a fresh perspective, could I do this plan better than the way I’ve been thinking about it for the past six to 12 months?

That especially when you’re in a startup and you’re racing towards your next check, towards your funding to grow your team, to have this vision, all this sense of urgency just overwhelms everything. And there’s almost that reminder—Covid, in a lot of ways, was a reminder to go, Oh, you don’t know anything about what’s going to happen.

So one: make sure you take the time to plan, and make sure that you take the time to plan with lots of options. And two: that investment in looking at your plan and really being more critical however you need to get into that energy to look at what you put on paper in the first draft and really challenge yourself of, how can I do this better?

I think those were both things that again in this startup world felt like they were costing us a lot to invest in early on. But they led to things like, before Covid hit, we were looking to spin out of the university. We were pitching to investors and we didn’t have a lot of assets to pitch to investors.

So we knew those investor conversations. I’ll say it this way—those investors were going to get a great deal, right? And the way that we were going to deploy capital is we’d heard from the industry, from our customers that making a physical product, and making a big physical product—that was going to be the way to get them excited.

And therefore, one of the only ways to get investor money. And when we paused during this moment in Covid, we started to look at what we’d heard from investors in the market. And we really started to challenge it internally, saying, Well, you know, a lot of these options that they were giving us advice around—just go out and raise, raise more money and build bigger products.

Now with Covid, a lot of those funds weren’t being deployed the same way. So we were very incentivized to think much more efficiently about our path to market. And it led to us, instead of saying, Hey, we need to jump out and we need to make a two-foot by five-foot window product from this material that was about, you know, six inches at most in the lab.

We actually went back to our customers and said, Why were these sizes this important to you? And the more that we pushed on them, the more that we found that we actually really only had to do industry-standard testing on industry-standard test sizes to get over this hurdle of proving to our customers that the material that we had could do inside of a window what we said it could.

So that meant that all the sizes they’d been telling us because that was what they were used to working with were much bigger than what they really had to be. And that meant that we said, Oh, well, we can make you these sample sizes much, much sooner and at a much, much better quality if we don’t have to make them massive right away.

And in parallel, then we started to look for equipment that could produce those samples for us. And that was when we found a used piece of equipment from an expert in the process that was used to make our material. So during Covid, we went from this concept of having to raise a multimillion-dollar round to spin this idea out of the university and get started, to saying, Hey, $300,000 to $400,000 gets us the same customer traction in the same amount of time.

And so that combined with now we got used equipment, it also came with somebody that knew how to operate it and help us get it set up. So not only was it finding a better way to get to market. It was also finding more opportunities that were aligned to what we needed.

At the time, we didn’t really need this big piece of equipment. That was what investors and customers were telling us, because they didn’t understand the problem probably as intimately as we did. And that extra time during Covid for us to sort of pause and say, What are we really trying to achieve here? We’re trying to prove that this material works. We really don’t need to make these big sizes to do that. All of that came through a lot of discussion and a lot of testing those assumptions when we did pause to invest in saying, Is this the right plan?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So nobody wishes for another Covid 19 on the planet, right? At least I don’t and yet we want startups to be successful and we want the opportunity to rethink, especially things that cost a lot of money or would involve massive commitments that are hard for thinly resourced founders like yourself at that stage.

What learnings looking back would you offer to someone else who maybe is still under that pressure, under the gun to get moving now that we don’t have covid yet at that scale? What can they do to test? What is that? What is it secret? What’s the answer there to kind of pressure test those assumptions?

Elise Strobach: Yeah, I found that one of the best answers to that is to have lots of options at these really key points in your business. So one of the things that we think about often internally is the concept of a no-regret move. So for example, something that my investment in to get a positive outcome is either that investment that I put in is so small compared to the potential value that I get back or I know that no matter what, I’m going to have to take this action.

So for example, as I just described in this trying to find a vessel and trying to find a better way to market we didn’t only talk with the residential industry to know what their standardized tests were. We talked with all the other industries that we were exploring. Ss I mentioned, solar, thermal markets, grocery store freezer doors, oven doors.

And what was interesting is that in all of those, the same industry standard test size that would meet the window market, could also meet all of these other markets. So when we thought about this decision, it was no matter which of these scenarios that could arise. All of them had this similar aspect of this smaller vessel really focused on proving the minimum possible for the least amount of investment in. It was always the solution in all of those scenarios.

And so therefore, it became kind of this no-regret move. And there were other decisions that were really massive around, say, for example like where location-wise should we build our pilot facility? And some of those things we realized that we weren’t going to have the answers to do anything more than make a guess now.

But we put a little marker that says, hey, to make this decision with a responsible buffer in time so that we can act on this plan, we probably want to check back in on what we think this decision is going to look like about a month before we have to make it. And sometimes the decision itself, like where should we put this facility had become really different. What should we build out of this facility? Which then became much more important than where it would go.

But there are also other points in time where that decision altogether, we realized that the key decision wasn’t around where we’re going to build our factory. It was how are we going to get this into the beachhead market?

Like physically, where are we going to place this? And maybe building a facility or scoping out a facility the way that we had shouldn’t be the only solution that we explore. And I think with fundraising, this concept of optionality and especially with COVID. One of the biggest is when you talk about the balance of non-dilutive and dilutive funding, it’s fantastic to have grant applications always in and always have this possibility of new funding coming in even if you feel like when you’re fundraising that one particular investor is going to be the one that’s going to invest.

It may be that the next COVID virus pops up and all of a sudden that investor just isn’t able to participate which is why you want to be having conversations with multiple investors. And maybe even multiple kinds of investors. So I think this idea of taking a look at those aspects of your business that are really important and giving yourself lots of options during those periods of times where you have to make these big decisions.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So I took three takeaways from that. Let me know if these reflect your views accurately.

Number one is, obviously, the point of optionality, right? The more options, the better.

The second theme I picked up was also around: don’t make decisions until you have to. So don’t make premature decisions because you might not need to make the decision.

And to your point, you might commit yourself and then reduce some optionality because now you’re committed to one path versus others.

And this third point around—I don’t know to what extent that it’s applicable—but this point around theory of constraints, right? The bottleneck keeps changing at every different point.

It sounds like early on it’s like the story in The Goal, right? Early on, it was around production and then it moves to market acceptance. So to kind of keep that view fluid in your mind, to say: what is the next most critical thing that’s likely to block our progress, and therefore needs to be addressed, while keeping your options open, while looking for those moves that are going to pay off in any scenario. It’s kind of like the overall theme I picked up from the great examples you provided. Is that a fair characterization?

Elise Strobach: Yeah, I think that’s a great summary.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Awesome. Okay, so then I just want to touch a couple more topics in terms of commercialization and the actual product and process itself.

You talked about this point around changing the size and making sure that you could do something with a much smaller investment than the millions of dollars you were anticipating. Were there other challenges that you faced in terms of scaling up a technical innovation?

Because that’s something I hear from a lot of deep tech entrepreneurs—which is: everything works in the lab, some work in the pilot, and good luck with commercial scale. Like, was that an issue? And if so, how did you kind of come around that challenge?

Elise Strobach: Yeah, it’s a great question. There are maybe a couple things that AeroShield learned there through the scale-up journey that I can share. You know, I think one of the challenges that we had was a lot of prove it and then come back, right?

You know, especially when we were in the lab, these six-inch rounds of saying, once we have the equipment to scale this up. We have examples of other people who have used this process and scaled it up. So we know that if you give us the funds based on all this evidence that we have in the lab, we’re going to put this equipment together and then we’re going to show you that we can produce these nice, beautiful, industry-standard test sample sizes.

And it was so interesting how, you know, this concept of “build it and they will come” was definitely present but nobody would give us the money or the resources to build it, right? And I think that concept of trying to really get somebody to understand that potential before it’s physical, especially when you’re trying to deliver a physical product was really tricky.

I think one of the things that we did to navigate that was, we went for a lot of optionality with our funding resources, especially early on. You know, some of these grants that we applied for, you would have to apply for kind of nine to twelve months before you potentially would get them.

So we were sort of always looking at grants and when we would win a grant, we would use that as proof points with investors and customers to say, “This entity who funds things like this and understands the market. They see why we’re valuable. They’re giving us funds, and look, that’s not funding. That’s just free money that this company has.

So don’t you want to be a part of this, in this momentum? So I think that was one of the things that helped us make baby steps towards getting to something we could physically show a customer. And then once we could start to physically show samples and progress, definitely the scaling up got easier.

One, I think people believed the proof that we had. Two, we also started to get out of, at least for our industry, what I felt like was a weird interim phase where we weren’t doing lab-sized equipment anymore that wasn’t big enough or didn’t have the capabilities but we definitely weren’t ready for industrial-scale equipment.

Especially in our industry, where the sheets are twelve feet by twelve feet—that’s what they make glass in—we weren’t going to start there. So I feel like that was some of the challenges we had, we knew that if we could produce it with, and we had enough time we could achieve what we were promising. But they wanted to see some of that promise before they would give us the funds to scale that up.

And so again, just using other creative sources, finding other ways that people would validate that the small sample or the small demonstration that we had now warranted investing. I think that was something that we had to get good at.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: That is an excellent point and one that I keep hearing over and over again in deep tech.

Funding Strategies and Grant Applications

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So, which brings me to the question of funding. So you’ve got this chicken-and-egg problem: you’ve got the technology, and if only you could get X million dollars, you can get to the other side. And you can’t get to the other side unless they prove that you can actually do what you’re saying you’re going to do with that, which you can’t do without that X million dollars.

So you mentioned grants several times and how they were critical. Can you just walk me through how you came about this funding strategy? What was that thinking process, and how did that play out in real life over months while you were looking for this funding and while all of this stuff was going on?

Elise Strobach: Yeah, I would say for me, a huge bias is coming from the research background. Grants actually were the place where I felt much more comfortable than thinking about VC or equity investment. So, from that standpoint, by the time that I was getting to the end of my PhD and the company was ready to spin out, I already felt like I had a really good understanding of grant writing strategy.

There’s definitely maybe just a tidbit of how we thought about it when it was kind of purely optimizing for grants: there are sort of more applications that you could apply for than you’re going to have time for. And so, we did start to get really good at kind of having a series of three to five questions that when we saw a new grant opportunity, we would pass it through the filter. It would sort of go to the top of the list or the bottom. So, we started to get really efficient with the way that we applied for grants and really good at—one of my board members called it “sniping,” right?—like really picking up the opportunities that AeroShield had an elevated chance of being successful in.

So, we started to get really good at sort of just having this continual grant pipeline. And as we got closer to spinning out, opportunities started to open up where it wasn’t just grants; there were pitching competitions, like I mentioned, the Clean Energy Prize and incubators, like the CleanTech Open. And honestly, in a lot of ways, they ran very similar to grant programs or sort of courses that I’d taken at the university. So, that felt like a really good transition point. That then it always felt like if we were— as we got one grant, one of the aspects of that grant is they also want to see us be successful afterwards.

So, it also got us into networks and ecosystems where then, for example, our NSF iCorps. So we did innovation corps, which gives you money to go out and actually conduct these interviews with a hypothesis-focused market research and from there, if you go through the national program, you have a much higher odds of being selected for an NSF SBIR or Small Business Innovation Research grant. And then, from the SBIR Phase One, there’s a much bigger pool of money available for Phase Two and sort of that, you know, it’s a very long, slow process.

But the grants evolved, the opportunities evolved with us, and as we grew our team, our expertise, our focus, we had the formula for how to snipe. And we could say, Okay, well, we’re going to snipe on grants for windows and solar,” or “windows and solar, and in this area of fundamental material, we’re going to do it in freezer doors as well. So, as our market strategy, as our overall funding strategy evolved, the grants and the non-dilutive continued to be reactive to what we needed at the time.

Navigating Grant Funding Challenges

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: I have a question for you. How long did it take you to come up with that algorithm that question that the rubric or the engine, the rules engine for, and what were those questions and what is portable in that for other founders for not in the window space or the advanced material space, but we’re still looking for grants?

Elise Strobach: Yeah, so the good news, bad news is that, one of my co-founders that I found at one of these courses at MIT was doing his MBA and his master’s in chemical engineering. So, he also brought with him some prior experience from the Boston Consulting Group. And so, he was the one that really got into the Excel spreadsheets and we had been talking through these opportunities.

As time evolved, it probably took us about a six-month cycle of going through enough grants where we started to realize that there were a couple things that, if you asked yourself, “What’s the topic area? How restrictive is the funding in terms of deployment?” Some of them are upfront capital, and you can spend it on whatever you want, and if it changes, that’s fine. And some of them were very restrictive. This has to be spent at a national lab in kind meaning we’re going to pay for a National Lab member to do this work, and none of that money’s going to go to AeroShield and be able to be used how we want.

So, we found that there were different things that were important to us at different points in time. And there were always out of a list of maybe 20 things that I think about the different phases of AeroShield’s growth, that overall have been important. At any one period of time, there were only ever three to five things that really moved the needle.

And just maybe as a bit of an example, there was one period in time where, having lots early in the exploration of the technology, lots of opportunities, lots of different markets that we were looking at with a more fundamental technology. That was really what we needed to have the flexibility to build the product development in the way we needed to. And then later on, we found that there was much more value, like more recent grants being able to be very specific into the built environment because there are nuances around deploying a product that the expertise of being in those ecosystems with those grant funders. That became way more important than having this general flexibility.

And so, being able to put those things at those different phases of time and say, at any given point in time, my non-dilutive funding is going to be prioritized to match the needs of my business. But those things can change over time. That’s sort of the approach.

Balancing Business Direction and Grant Requirements

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So has there ever been or was there ever a conflict where you felt that the fundamental direction of the business was at risk because you had to shape yourself to be a certain way to achieve fundability for a certain grant that was very large, for example.

Elise Strobach: Yeah definitely. I remember having a lot of conversations internally at the time that we were going through actually American Made Solar Prize. So, that is a pretty unique competition from the standpoint that it’s one of those that gives you the money and you can kind of do whatever you want, but they do it in tranches. And so, kind of the first round, and I’m going to get this wrong, but let’s say like the first round, if you were selected, you had a $25,000 grant, and then they down-selected from the 20 participants. Half of them made it through to the next phase, and if you made it through, you got $50,000.

I remember in the early stages of the grant, we picked a working partner in solar thermal because that was the focus of the grant. I remember through the course of that grant, we went on to win one of the two grand prizes which led us to $500,000 in non-dilutive funding.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Awesome.

Elise Strobach: With no restrictions, it was amazing. But I remember in the beginning telling my team, saying I don’t think that we should do this. I think that this is a distraction.

This is solar thermal. I know that the funding is potentially there but we have to go through all these stages and we’d have to partner with the potential customer that is also pretty small and still kind of in their startup phase in a lot of ways as well. So this feels like a lot of risk and a lot of expectations on AeroShield when we’re trying to make this path to market in residential windows.

So it’s definitely been, it’s definitely been something like we’ve had to balance. And it was so interesting to go through the course of that solar thermal grant and get to the end, win the $500,000. Oh my goodness, amazing like I was wrong. And then have to give a third of that money just straight to that partner in a market that we weren’t going to enter for a very long time.

And with a packet of research that was exciting. It gave us a lot of publicity and it helped us hire people. It helped us do research that was really fundamentally valuable. But also it took a huge amount of time away from developing the residential opportunity. And even though I had on paper $500,000 when the grant was done. By the time I walked away from that opportunity, it maybe was only 50 to 100 thousand dollars of net gain when I looked at what came out.

And so I don’t regret. That was a huge opportunity for us. It created momentum in a market that really helped us validate a lot of our assumptions about this solar thermal market as a secondary option or as a future market for exploration. But definitely after that, I remember having much more methodical conversations about like, how are we going to assess the value of these new grants? And not end up in the same kind of, hey, I invested a lot of work to get very little net gain out.

Lessons Learned and Strategies for Successful Grant Applications

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So, is it fair to say that knowing what you know now, would you have decided differently at that juncture?

Elise Strobach: I think we would have applied for the grant a little bit differently—like just even subtle things where, and I’m probably going to misquote this, but I remember we acted on the grant as partners with this other entity. But they could have been the lead. Maybe taken a little bit more of the capital upfront and our team wouldn’t have had to deal with all of the administrative or the grant writing—maybe the overhead, the investment for us to be a part of the grant.

Maybe we could have delegated that to somebody else or maybe we could have applied for the grant with really firm boundaries like, hey, even if we get selected for this next phase but the work doesn’t feel like it’s aligned anymore, we’ll plan to decline and to make some of those judgments in the beginning before you’re in the momentum of the project. I think those are some things that I definitely do differently.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: One thing that I’m hearing loud and clear from you that I think perhaps some founders may not appreciate as well is the invisible and enormous overhead involved in applying for grants because it’s a probabilistic game.

And from what I understand, you know, SBIR, STTR—regardless, depending on which grant you apply to, you don’t, maybe you have like a 30–40% chance of winning. And  you have to keep redoing. Do you have a view on that? Like, how do you assess that overhead cost or how do you make intelligent choices?

Elise Strobach: Yeah I think one of the biggest strategies—so let’s assume that we’re talking about grants here that do have real, real aligned value—I think one of the strategies and particularly like for NSF SBIR, is doing your best to try and make the application process also valuable for you.

So in grants like an NSF SBIR, I remember using those grant applications to also share with potential advisors or investors like getting their feedback on the grant, but also having that be a way to test out some more of the fundamental story, especially when it was very clearly technical-focused.

I mean, there’s a huge commercialization aspect of the NSF SBIR applications. So being able to use that as a way to one: have our team put together this packet, and then two: use it to engage with these audiences in a safe space.

So another example is, AeroShield was just awarded the ARPA-E ScaleUP grant. So a very big one. So 14 and a half million dollars of non-dilutive funding.

The grant was first offered by ARPA-E in 2019 and they just transitioned to a rolling cycle. But it used to be every two years that they’d open the application and AeroShield applied every year. The first year, we didn’t even make it through the initial phase, right? But knowing what that grant process was like, knowing the time of the grant like going through as much of that process as we could.

I remember when we submitted our concept paper, from the time that the grant opportunity opened up to the time we had to submit was not enough time to put together a concept paper. But that was because we had never put together a concept paper of this scope or this magnitude. We didn’t have prior applications we could pull from. So the first thing we realized is, oh, they just opened this grant. We’re a great match.

We did not get selected to advance this round. Let’s put it on our calendar for six months before the next one opens up that we’re going to apply to that one and we’re going to start that concept paper based on what we knew from the first cycle. We’re going to draft it well before we know it’s due. So then, when we came back around to the second cycle. We had the concept paper, we got selected into the full technical volume, full presentation.

The Importance of Customer Partnerships

Elise Strobach: We used that as a way to go to our customer partners and say, look the federal government is really excited about what we’re building. There’s a possibility that there could be a huge chunk of money that really gives us an advantage in getting this solution out to the market quickly. Do you want to be a part of that? It’s going to require some commitment from you.

One, there’s cost share on the grant, which is just like a great way—if you haven’t had a chance to ask your customer for money yet, we don’t even know if we’ll win this, but if we do, there’s free money. You just have to put in a little money to match to help us get it out.

And it was interesting because we didn’t get selected through that round but the customer relationships, the way that it forced them to advance much more quickly than if we had just been without the grant. If we didn’t have this forcing function, we wouldn’t have ended up with the letters of support, the letters of intent in hand that we had.

And another nuance that unfortunately I can’t share too much about but we actually had one of these customer partners that we really thought that this was the customer partner that we were going to go to market with. There was a lot of synergy between the two things that we were doing. And 12 hours before in this second round of the grant that we went to submit, we had to kind of attest that we were good to go for the final submission.

It was just everybody who was named on the grant just had to kind of give their thumbs up, acknowledge that we’d been selected to move on. And this customer partner decided that they no longer saw AeroShield as a partner, but potentially as a competitor. And so, with 12 hours of notice, our point of contact had to reach out to us and say, hey, not only can we not give the thumbs up, you’ve made it this far in the grant progress, we can’t help you support the application further, but we have to rescind the commitments that we’ve given that are necessary to receive this grant.

And if we hadn’t had that force and function of the grant, maybe we’ll stop. The good news is we had a backup customer partner. Coming back to lots of optionality and really seeking to understand the market, they actually within 12 hours, were able to replace this entity on the grant so we could still move forward with the grant process.

But I think it’s no surprise that we weren’t selected that year. And more importantly, before we went out to our fundraise with our investors, now we really knew how much we could trust this customer partner. So that was an incredibly valuable lesson that, regardless of the outcome of the grant, was worth its weight in gold.

And then we fast forward to the happy ending of the story, which is the third application cycle came around. AeroShield applied. We had this much better aligned customer partner—the one who had stepped in and really rescued us. Now they were the main customer partner in our application and it led to us having a successful grant.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: That’s awesome. So, it almost feels like you’re developing a competence and the ability to reuse assets and work product from earlier grants into successive cycles. But maybe not just for this grant. It sounds like it could be usable to other grants too, if you’re the kind of startup that has the potentiality to apply to multiple grants.

But this concept around trying to make that process lean and efficient and building this inventory of products that you could use, whether it’s a concept paper, whether it’s a list of customers who are willing to sign up and say, Yeah, I’ll be a customer partner. I have a founder who could possibly use this advice as we speak. So, very well taken.

Venture Capital and Speed to Market

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So one last question on the funding, which is, you have also raised venture capital, right? So can you just walk us through, when did that happen? What were the challenges? What was the thinking behind that decision and how that whole process came about?

Elise Strobach: Yeah, so pretty early on, as we were doing the sort of impact potential modeling with the path to market, as we were getting ready to spin out of the university, I think we saw that speed to market not only was important from an impact potential right? The sooner you get a sustainable energy-saving product out there, the more, over time, it has more time to save that energy but also, when we think about the return on the investment for a potential funder who’s really motivated by a return on their investment—right?

And something like Scale-Up, ARPA-E, non-dilutive, they’re investing in Aeroshield because we have a solution that can enhance America’s national security, right? Can help better the lives of our citizens. And for a lot of reasons, that makes sense. But with a VC funder right? There has to be this real potential for a return on their investment.

And so our team was very motivated by this impact story of, hey, the sooner we get into the market, the bigger impact we have. And we saw that wasn’t really going to be possible with just non-dilutive funding. We also saw that the market,  you know, the residential window market, had really not been disrupted in the way that we would traditionally say for more than 50 years now.

So in a lot of ways, that really ended up playing a part as well. And what we saw is that it was unlikely until we got VC money, until we made some sort of impact potential into the market. They weren’t going to strategically invest in us—if that makes sense. So really, venture capital and not the market coming in and saying, oh, this invention at MIT is so great, I’m just going to buy it right out of the lab and do all this work myself.

We really saw that the speed to impact and the most likely path to creating value in the market was us really quickly getting the capital, building assets, and getting a product demonstrated in the market. And as we talked to other companies in this space, but also in hard tech and cleantech spaces, VC funding. If you find somebody who’s aligned with not only that financial return but also that impact story. So we call them double bottom line investors. We realized that AeroShield could have kind of the best of both worlds.

And so that was the impetus to saying, hey, there are entities like the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, which has a real long-term motivation to invest in the state’s technologies and making sure that we have a clean energy future. And they’re very patient with how those returns will come. And so that was exciting for us, because somebody who’s patient to get those returns is also willing to invest in the story of a big return willing to invest in that thoughtful planning upfront and wait for that to come to lead to really great outcomes.

And so that was what led us. That was what got us started. And it was actually MassCEC that COVID hit, we were talking with some investors who said, oh, we’ve got to rethink what we’re going to do now that the world is in this new state. And entities like MassCEC stepped up and said, we’re going to offer a funding opportunity to help support these companies at the time when they need it most.

And so the experience with having them lead our pre-seed round and then eventually our seed round was really, when we found them and other entities who had that alignment with that double return, the impact and the financial gain that was really where AeroShield saw this exciting path with VC funding to be able to get to market and have an impact really soon.

Impact-Driven Business and Financial Returns

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: I don’t know how you want to answer this but there’s a perception that if you’re an impact driven business then the investor in an impact business has to give up something in terms of financial upside. Do you agree with that or do you think that’s the case in your situation?

Elise Strobach: I think as a generalization, I don’t think that’s true. I think that in the same way that intrinsic motivation. I think that this idea of impact, I think Aeroshield sees that the same as the financial reward.

It’s almost if we do our job really well, our business model shows that the impact and the financial success are linked. It’s almost like if we aim for the impact, the financial success will be an outcome, an indicator, a measure, an important measure of how well we’re doing our job. And so from that way, to me, they feel incredibly synergistic.

And this idea that, from a psychology standpoint, does paying somebody infinitely more money make them work infinitely more hard? No. Like at some threshold, there’s a lot of studies on this that people’s feeling of fulfillment, you can pay them more but if they don’t have independence, the ability to kind of master their own career in some kind of purpose, it doesn’t matter how much you pay them.

And so from that standpoint, and just seeing it in our team it’s this double motivation. It’s so much more intuitive for the team. It’s so much intuitive for our customers and our investors. It just, it just makes sense. Yeah.

Adapting to Changing Market Conditions

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Awesome. So I just want to talk about the world has changed significantly in the last few months. And the world looks a little different, especially if you’re in the clean tech and climate related deep tech solutions.

So what’s your view on startups pursuing these kinds of solutions in today’s environment? What has changed and what should they do differently or how should they think about success and growth differently today than they might have a year ago?

Elise Strobach: Yeah, I think that’s a great question. I think so much of my experience and kind of going from research scientist to startup has been—it’s just sort of like a slightly different way to manage the risks. And it feels like in the startup world, there’s so much uncertainty. That’s why some of my advice is like to create optionality because there is so much unknown about what you’re doing.

I think if you’re truly disrupting an area, right? Nobody’s done it in this way before. And yet, at the same time, there are so many examples of lessons that you can learn of people who have done it successfully or unsuccessfully.

So I think my advice is that I think the risks and the potential rewards are different. I don’t necessarily know that it’s—it’s worse. I think that when the market is going really well and there’s a perception of all this funding and all this money, it can lead companies to evolve differently and it can lead to more companies maybe making it through the first stage when maybe they should have gone out of business that they weren’t strong enough.

It’s almost like—like there’s too many resources. There’s not this healthy amount of filtering out people who do deserve to make it through—like their business idea deserves to make it through. And let’s just arbitrarily say, you know, the pre-seed filter of—if there’s less pre-seed capital, maybe it means that there are less entities that make it onto the seed pathway.

But then maybe you have less competition for the capital that’s available. You know, maybe when times are harder, when you are successful, if you can make it through this change in that early funding, maybe that means that the entities who have the funding waiting on the other side now they have nothing to invest in. So if you can survive, there’s nobody else who has made it through. So now you’re the only one that they get to that they have to pick from.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: You know, there’s a saying that the best time to start a company’s in a recession, right? I don’t know if you’ve heard that. I’ve read that.

Elise Strobach: I definitely heard that.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So it’s kind of like an analog to that, right? Because if you’re starting really tough circumstances and another way of characterizing what we’re seeing now could be just a very different and difficult set of circumstances, particularly for cleantech and energy based businesses. Therefore, only the strongest shall survive. And if you’re strong, it’s a good thing because you are going to survive.

Elise Strobach: That’s definitely a little bit of the sentiment of it’s maybe and then maybe that’s my compromise for saying it’s not all bad.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Spoken like a true entrepreneur right?

Elise Strobach: Yeah. There are ways to make advantage.

Advice for Founders in the Current Climate

Shubha K. Chakravarthy:  So the glass is half full, right? So, one last question on kind of current realities. The grant world is also undergoing a sea change. I think there’s enough flux.

So, are you seeing for companies like yours, which rightfully depend on a lot of government support, because that’s what innovation is all about, it’s about making bets on long-term plays that can have significant impact—what are you seeing as possible paths forward? Or what words of wisdom would you give to another founder who’s maybe where you were four years ago and who faces a much different world today than maybe you did?

Elise Strobach: Yeah, I think one piece that I can share is that, in AeroShield’s kind of go-to-market, once we committed to taking the venture capital path, we then approached our non-dilutive funding. So all of our grants as—we’re not going to plan on winning this, we’re not going to assume that we have this capital.

It’s only going to be, here’s our core goals. We’re going to guarantee that we have this money from investors, and all these additional goals that create a lot of value before we raise again. That’s how we’re going to focus on the grants and the non-dilutive—so the things that we can’t really guarantee that we’ll get or that we’ll be there.

And so, that means, to be candid with you, even right now with this scale-up funding, AeroShield is preparing scenarios for some or all of that being delayed or rescinded. And it goes back to even when we applied for the grant—we still have the two Excels of winning this grant and not winning this grant, and no matter what, it’s going to have a path forward.

In the past, the way that AeroShield has sort of planned for grants is, we sort of have this system of sniping, right? So we’ve put together a—let’s say that we apply for, in a year, an aggregate of $10 million in potential funding opportunities. We usually plan—it’s a little bit more methodical than this, but not a lot—that we say, hey, these 10% of those we really feel that it’s really smart to plan that we’re going to get at least 10% of this $10 million.

So we’re going to assume that over the next calendar year, we’re going to have $1 million of additional non-dilutive funding. And oftentimes, we get two to three times more than that. Now we’re assuming that there’s no non-dilutive funding. So we’re making sure that we have a path, that we have a way to keep the business alive and move it forward if there’s no non-dilutive funding, and that we’re finding ways to still apply for those grants but to make the scopes of work be nice-to-haves. Things that would really help us go faster after we would use the next tran of funding but aren’t required to get to the tran of funding.

And so we’re able then to tell our investors that, hey, if the worst case happens, we still have a company, we can still return on this promise of impact and financial return. But if we get these grants—oh, you guys are getting a really exciting opportunity to be part of something that’s going to go to market really fast and really disrupt.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So you’re in. In other words, it sounds like you’re—first of all—you’re trying, you’re prioritizing goals in terms of absolutely must-haves, and then kind of layering on and saying nice-to-haves. And then you’re tying those goals to specific sources of funding and saying, for the risk capital that I get from investors, I’m going to deliver these things, and I’m going to make sure that’s going to be enough to deliver on the promise or expectation that they need to see from that capital.

And then everything else is upside. But even for the upside, I’m tying tranches of potential grants I get to potential goals, and then have an eye on how those goals are still going to add incremental value to my investors if you’re lucky enough to get them.

Elise Strobach: Exactly. Yeah.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So it’s a question of it’s an exercise of prioritization. And optimization, generally speaking regardless of whether it’s what’s happening to grants or what’s happening with the recession or what have you, it sounds like a more fundamental first principles based approach to optimizing what you have and focusing on what’s most important.

Elise Strobach: Yeah. No, and I think that makes a lot of sense—especially because, you know, uh, today, when I’ve talked about non-dilutive or grant funding, I definitely mentioned things like the Scale up grant or the NSF SBIR. But there are a lot of non-dilutive fundings that don’t look the same as those grants.

And so, the way that you might, for your business, look at them and say, “Should I apply to these or not?”—the optimization would be different. So, I think that’s a really powerful way to take a look at what AeroShield is doing.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Awesome. Okay.

Final Thoughts and Personal Reflections

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So just to conclude, you’re a pretty rare founder, you know, being a woman in a very tough space. What advice would you give other founders like you, to maximize their chances of success?

Elise Strobach: Yeah, I do have a couple of sort of tidbits that I’ve heard from people along the way that really stuck with me. So I think the first one is that startups don’t starve — they drown. And that was a really hard concept for me to recognize before we really got into the heat of AeroShield full-time.

And I think the concept there is almost like what we were talking about with these grants of really, truly, if you wanted to say, I’m going to spend all my time trying to get non-dilutive grants, it would be a full-time job. But if all you do is apply to non-dilutive grants, you’re not making any progress on the business, right? You’re not developing your product. You’re not hiring anybody. You’re not growing, You’re just trying to maintain.

So I think this idea that prioritizing where you need to get to and being really sure that you’re saying no to opportunities that even they’d be nice to have if you had unlimited time  but saying that all opportunities, all investors, all grants, all people that want to work for your company, all free interns, they might drown you, right? They might be really nice to have, they might be valuable, but they’re not what you need in that moment to move the business forward.

So I found that one was really helpful. I think in maybe a similar vein is the concept of getting a lot of advice along the journey, right? And everybody has an opinion. And when you’re pitching as a startup founder or you’re trying to convince a customer that this solves their problem,  there’s a lot of everybody’s opinion on how you’re presenting it, what you’re presenting it, what it means for them. And one of the pieces  like I really struggled with taking all these different perceptions, especially when they were conflicting with each other and knowing how to go forward.

So one of my favorite pieces of advice is: don’t accept criticisms and internalize them from people that you wouldn’t go to for advice on that topic. I think that idea  of whose voice I’m letting take space in my head should be the people who I would go to, who I trust, who I respect, who I would value their perspective, not just whoever gives it to me. And that seems like a subtle change, but I found that really empowering, especially with investor conversations.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Awesome. Anything else you’d add?

Elise Strobach: Yeah. I always forget the last one. Oh, there, I remember what. So the last piece of advice I have is that when it comes to investing, I found I’m a very collaborative person. I didn’t really like the transactional aspects of potentially going out and pitching to lots of different investors.

I like to really kind of get to know somebody. And one of the ways that you can use that in your fundraising strategy is using this piece of advice, which is that, with investment especially with VC, if you go to them and you ask for money, it’s likely that you’re going to get advice.

But if you go to them and ask for advice, it’s very likely that leads to money. Which to me I ended up interpreting that much more of relating it almost to that advice comment of: whose opinion whether they invested in me or not, whose opinion did I want to hear on? If my pitch deck was investible, if this customer was really going to participate in this grant with me.

And so from that part, I think that piece of advice on making sure that I’m not being afraid to show these investors what’s coming, not being afraid to go to them a little bit early, not being afraid to say I’m thinking about it in two different ways, and then have them tell you which one they like better and then be able to come back and give them, deliver them that version of the pitch.

So, so I think that’s my last piece of advice.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Awesome. So this has been an amazing conversation, a very helpful one for many deep tech founders. Is there anything else that I should have asked that you wish I’d asked but I didn’t?

Elise Strobach: I don’t think so. I think maybe like one last piece that I would share. All of my peers talk about imposter syndrome definitely in the CEO role. And one of the things that I’ve just found surprising in a great way, is how there are lots of my experiences, well before I got to grad school that were not relevant  or I thought they weren’t relevant to entrepreneurship, to startups, or maybe even to this fundamental problem, that have ended up being super useful.

So, for example, this one was actually during grad school, in some of the mid years, where there was a little bit  I wasn’t full-time at a show yet. I had a little bit more opportunity to be social. I ended up starting a band just like a casual, fun little experience with a couple of people from my lab group.

And when I look back now on that experience of how do you convince four or five grad students to come in their time off to play music that is never going to make it out onto Spotify  let’s be honest — and I think finding that, understanding that I could get them to come to the band if they were motivated, if they saw what was in it for them, if they could share this vision of the enjoyment that we were getting.

And so much of that, I use every day in managing a team, in managing a board. Everybody wants to be a part of this story. They want to go along the journey. And that’s one example of, like, a prior experience in my life that I would’ve discredited. I wouldn’t put that on a resume, but that really fundamentally is much closer to what this startup experience is like than anything I had, being president of a SME back when I was in undergrad.

It’s so interesting to me that the things that maybe this audience — especially when you think about investors as being this audience that always feels like it’s evaluating you in some way or another. I spent a lot of time feeling that I needed to hide those facets of my personality or feeling guilty that, hey, instead of starting a band, I should have gone and worked for a startup. I should have gone and interned.

And I think just sort of saying that I just need to show up and be present, and everything that I’ve done is useful and relevant, and I can find a way to make it useful for this shared vision that we have here. I think just that has helped me counteract imposter syndrome in a lot of surprising ways.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: That is fabulous. Thank you. On that note, I think it’s an absolute high note to end on. I really appreciate you taking the time, Elise. This has been an amazing conversation, and I’m pretty sure I know I can count on my hand the founders who are going to find this useful, even from the ones I know forget the ones I don’t know. So, thank you so much and we’ll be rooting for you from the sidelines for AeroShield’s success. Thanks so much for being here today.

Elise Strobach: I really appreciate thank you for having me. It was such a pleasure to talk.